I see, they’re saving it up for someone even more racist than Steve King… some theoretical future super-racist.
That sounds like a super-effective strategy, the problem is that, by your standards, it is designed to never happen.
I think you can say Obama was born in Hawaii (the example of mine you’re quoting), without “saving” your judgement just so it will have extra “gravitas” later.
Nope. They save it up for next week.
It’s all exciting and fun to hear the news call King a racist. But that’s because you and I believe he is one. It’s comforting to hear our opinions validated. We can point to an article and say “Even the news is calling him a racist.” But is it news or editorial?
If you believe it’s the job of journalist to decide and say who is and isn’t “X”, and we are all journalists according to one poster on here, and it’s pretty damn rare for everyone to agree on diddly, you get the death of truth. “I say he’s X.” “I say he’s not X.” Who’s right? How about the person with evidence?
As I keep saying, it’s far more effective to avoid the appearance of injecting an opinion into the news and instead go the “Here’s the evidence of Xiness. Items 1, 2, 3…” Then a reporter get’s to eat their cake and keep it too. They get to make the case for someone being X, they convince us to agree (which was the point, wasn’t it?), and they add to their reputation by appearing objective. Let the editorial side of the business say “He’s X!”
Not sure about your Obama example. Fact of his birth is on his birth certificate. But what about the “journalists” who call him a socialist? I’d wager the instant you see someone call him a socialist, you form an opinion of that person. Do you feel they are being objective? They aren’t waiting for some theoretical future super-socialist. They are telling the truth as they see it. So we should agree, eh?
Now different outlets will have different standards. BoingBoing is probably ok with calling King racist. Not going to ruffle many feathers. I wasn’t bothered since I know BoingBoing editors are writing editorials. And I don’t disagree with this opinion. But NBC News is (in theory) objective news. That’s a different game where the importance of appearing neutral is important to them. The approach to calling someone racist or socialist, is different.
Obama was called a socialist by various reporters. It’s great for understanding if the paper understands the basic concept.
Papers make politically-charged value judgments all the time, and print them. They call people activists, protestors, famous, popular, controversial, experts, troubled, forgotten, Left, Right, etc.
I don’t expect journalists to avoid all subjective descriptions. I might expect them to try and get them right, but that’s different.
And it’s not “fun” to hear racist behaviour described as racist, it’s necessary and helpful to society. Maybe if the reporters covering Steve King before he was elected mentioned he was more than just “racially-tinged-adjacent-if-you-squint” than it would have helped inform an electorate more clearly and directly. That’s not about “fun”.
Also,
is not the same as having no opinions. It’s a fake veneer of neutrality. It can be as misleading as someone wearing a doctor’s lab coat on an infomercial. Hiding the messenger’s viewpoint doesn’t always educate. “Hiding the appearance” is often another way to misdirect from what we know about a situation.
Again, the problem here is that NBC’s management is asking editorial not to characterise his statements as racist:
“Be careful to avoid characterizing [King’s] remarks as racist,” reads the email, which two NBC News staffers shared with HuffPost. “It is ok to attribute to others as in ‘what many are calling racist’ or something like that.”
To recap:
“People say this volcano is erupting” = news/good
“This volcano is erupting” = opinion/bad
I dunno man. I don’t think i can get on board with this approach.
It does seem to be lacking in both logic and commitment to reality.
The argument, which eventually struck me as terribly flawed and disingenuous, seems to be that nothing concrete can be said about the actions of a human. So for illustrative satire I think for instance this person is arguing that despite the manifesto none of us could ever say that the Unabomber was motivated by contempt for Academia. Even though that’s literally what he said. It’s… it’s really a lousy argument. I suppose along with that we can’t call him a terrorist. I mean his actions fit the legal definition of terrorism and he’s been convicted, but we don’t really know his mind.
If that’s the kind of logic one hides behind, I’m not sure we can really call it “logic” so much as intellectual cowardice and dishonesty. It makes me sad that this disgusting habit in the media of presenting facts with so much waffling is considered anything but dangerous. We’ve been drowned in “alternative” facts because too many people have accepted that “facts” are subjective opinions and that all opinions are created equal (they’re definitely not, some people’s opinions are completely ignorant and other people’s are informed by expertise). All this boils down to an inability to clearly think about language and meaning which makes people very vulnerable to disinformation. This is the kind of thinking that puts Alex Jones on equal footing with Bob Woodward.
Agreed. But it’s done for a reason. There’s no point in avoiding all subjective descriptions. But there is a point to selectively coming at them sideways. For BoingBoing, there wouldn’t be a point in avoiding calling King racist. But for an NBC news reporter who is seen by a wider audience, many of whom are not liberal, you can defeat your purpose of convincing this wider audience that King is a racist by jumping to the punch line. They figure the reporter is biased and ignore the evidence. Maybe even begin to resist it or change to Fox News where they will never hear the evidence.
Better in the short and long run to play the “I don’t know if he’s a racist, but let’s look at the evidence together” game. Sort of like if I tell you something is a duck, you’ll question my qualifications to make that decision. But if I say “Hey, here’s an animal that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck. Do you think it’s a duck?” your response would be “It’s a f******g duck, you moron! Call it a duck!”
It’s not about letting someone off the hook. It’s about using human psychology to get them to agree with you by thinking it’s their idea. It’s the silly game of Objective Journalism that Thompson is calling BS on. But it works.
That’s the reason.
This sounds like you’re saying that being racist is just a subjective thing, where we still need neutral people to moderate an ongoing debate about it. But haven’t we’ve decided that racism and racists are objectively bad?
This is a stylistic gamble, and frankly I’d need to see repeated trials to judge how much it works. Just accepting that this tactic works strikes me as dangerous. Most people simply view themselves as the expert, encouraging that doesn’t guarantee they’ll come to a reasonable position at all. Have you… met any people?
Yes. To the point it’s also used as an insult. And we have extremely polarized politics. Which is why if you call a politician racist, some people will just assume you are being partisan. Then everything else you say gets discounted. It’s about the audience you are speaking to and your goals. Speaking to people who already agree with you, call him a racist. Speaking to someone you are trying to educate, then lead them through it and let them make the conclusion that is obvious to you.
You can also defeat a purpose of calling racist behaviour racist, by never calling it racist.
Ass-covering and plausible deniability may help someone stay out of trouble, but it’s not always the better thing to do, and it’s not the part that’s journalism. I understand what you’re saying about playing games with the public, but being coy about racist human behaviour has frequently proven not to be the best thing in the long run.
We know that “teaching the controversy” may sometimes be an “effective” way to avoid angry fundamentalist parents, but it’s not the best way to actually teach what we know about science.
If we can’t even point to actual racist behavior and give them a clear definition of it through their words and behaviors, then we can’t educate them. Much like rape most people will simply already have decided what they think, and coddling that only lets them come up with their own excuses and justifications. Your point would be more valid if we didn’t live in a world of deep state pedo pizza and professional fact scramblers. It also assumes the majority of people are thinking rationally but typically they’re thinking emotionally. Thus whether you suggest or state firmly the ones who don’t want to listen are going to take the same track, just your way they get a handy pack of ammo for shooting down any future fact, truth, or honesty.
The people I’ve met are stubborn. They don’t like to told what to think.
Speaking of study, here’s mention of one involving 22,000 people.
http://www.bytestart.co.uk/persuade-get-people-around-your-point-view.html
But they won’t think unless they have to, and letting them have an easy out is just that… an out. I really don’t see any value add in giving people an easy way to obfuscate or create false equivalences. The more language is tailored to suit the subjective emotional whims of the masses, the more those subjective emotional whims become our reality. Also strangely you’re the one now arguing for pushing opinions on people, what I’m arguing for is good reporting that is factual.
No one should never call it racist. Editorials should be more than happy to do that. News reporting takes a slightly different (as you say “coy”) approach of “Check out these racist sounding things this guy said.”
Funny you talk about science and teaching the controversy. My wife is a science teacher. She loves teaching science controversies. Geocentric vs heliocentric. Atomic model theory. And so on. Besides teaching the science concepts, it teaches critical thinking and how science really works. Her favorite controversy is who discovered the structure of DNA.
Guess what happens when she gets to creation vs evolution…
Let me try something because I really think something is being missed here. Let’s say we have a shooting. 15 black people are murdered in a church and the murderer carves swastikas onto their bodies. The murderer is found to be a member of a white nationalist organization and has contributed many blog posts about white supremacy. The news reports “some people are calling these actions racist.” Some people will act as you say, but many will not because there is no ongoing relationship or discourse with the news to create a persuasive environment. Thus some people will simply see this as a way to reduce what can be called racist and to justify these kinds of actions in the future while demonizing any criticism of them. I can’t abide that kind of thinking or anything that enables it.
You’re just bolstering the bad argument that racist behaviour should only be considered “just somebody’s feelings”.
“Teaching the controversy” here clearly isn’t referring to “teaching the history of science controversies in the context of a study of science history”. I’m sure your wife wouldn’t say it’s an equally held view among scientists that the Earth is 5000 years old and that both views deserve equal teaching time to new students in the modern world.
‘Rosalind Franklin’s work was given less credit due to sexist attitudes and behaviours.’ as a sentence, is an objectively true bit of reporting. Any level of journalist could back up that sentence solidly, every word. I don’t need to soft-pedal the word “sexist”.
In the same way, reporters don’t have to soft-pedal that Steve King has made racist remarks, in the way that most people define the words, in the same way that they back up their pronouncements about what his name is and what else he’s done with his time.
